Jay L GarfieldSmith CollegeUniversity of MelbourneCentral University of Tibetan Studies

1. Introduction: Authenticity and Impermanence

Those of us who are involved as teachers, scholars or practitioners with Buddhism in the West are— whether we wish to be or not—involved in a complex process of interaction between two cultures. Just asin the West Socrates urged that the most important task set for us in life is to know ourselves in theBuddhist tradition we are admonished to know the nature of our own minds as the key to awakening. Inevery Buddhist tradition, to know the nature of the self and its objects is the fundamental prerequisite tocutting off the root of cyclic existence.So even though it might seem like a kind of mundane and secular phenomenon, trying to understand thehistory and the sociology of the transmission of Buddhism to the West, understanding it is necessary for understanding ourselves, just because we are so intimately involved with it, and understanding ourselvesis necessary for liberation. This is just one more instance of the need to pay attention to mundane, secular phenomena around us, even if our primary interests are soteriological. Of course for those whose primaryinterest is the understanding of the contemporary Buddhist world for its own sake, it is plain that theengagement of Buddhism with modernity is an issue of concern. We should be alert as we examine thisengagement to the inevitable transformations Buddhism will work on modern culture, as well as to theinevitable transformations that modernity will work on Buddhism. As we consider the transformations of modern culture in which the importation of Buddhism will issue, we should be aware of this as amissionary process, in which the West is largely a patient, not an agent. As we consider the ways in whichBuddhism will inevitably modernize, we should be wary of the rhetoric of authenticity that can cloak areactionary defensiveness among practitioners that can threaten the relevance of the Buddhadharma to themodern world.Buddhism has been from the very beginning a missionary religion. Though this is a commonplace for anyone who has been involved in Buddhist Studies, it is something of which Western Buddhists aren’talways explicitly aware when they first encounter Buddhadharma. Missionaries went out from Sanchi tospread Buddhism throughout India; Missionaries went out as well to Sri Lanka, to China, to Indonesia,and of course eventually to Tibet, Korea and Japan, and Buddhism has spread through Asia not by

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accident, not by magic, not by sheer dint of the attractiveness or manifest truth of the Buddhadharma, butthrough deliberate missionary activity.In every one of these transmissions within Asia Buddhism has transformed the cultures that it hasinvaded. Equally importantly, in every one of these transmissions Buddhism itself has been transformed by the cultures that have adopted it. When we examine Buddhism’s entry into China we see that Chinesesociety, Chinese philosophy, including the philosophical systems of Daoism and Confucianism, becomedeeply inflected by Buddhist ideas. We see the growth of Buddhist monasteries altering aspects of theeconomic and social organizations of China and we see the debates between Buddhists and Daoists andConfucians as developing the Daoist and Confucian tradition in ways other than they would havedeveloped without this dialogue. When Buddhism was imported in Tibet Tibetan society was transformed beyond recognition from its pre-Buddhist nature to its Buddhist nature.As I indicated above, this transformative process is a two-way street, and it is instructive to examine theway Buddhism itself was articulated and developed in China and to compare it with the way it wasarticulated and developed in Tibet. The schools of Buddhism that developed in China—the Hua Yentradition, the Chan tradition, the Tian Tai tradition—look very different textually, doctrinally, and in theforms of practice they involve, from those that are developed in Tibet. The Indic scholasticism, as well asthe emphasis on tantra we find in Tibet are largely absent from China. The emphasis on s

ū

tra, thesyncretism among Indian traditions, and the composition of apocryphal s

ū

tras we find in China are absentin Tibet. Meditational practices are very different, and while vin

ā

ya codes are distinct, actual monasticlife looks quite different in Tibet and China. Given the topic of this chapter, there is no need to go intothis in detail here. The issues are well-known.Buddhist practitioners and scholars in almost every tradition valorize lineage and each valorizes the preservation of the “authentic” Buddhist tradition over the centuries. But it is also a central tenet of allBuddhist doctrine that nothing gets preserved unchanged and pure even from moment to moment, so thatrhetoric of authenticity demands critique. Sometimes, that is, what appears to be heresy is in fact the mostauthentic and orthodox path. My own thoughts about what happens when Buddhism moves into the Westare grounded in the conviction that the transmission of Buddhism to the West is in one sense completelycontinuous with what has happened throughout the history of Buddhism: the entry of Buddhism intodiverse cultures, resulting in the transformation of those cultures and of Buddhism itself.When we look from the West, for instance, at the multiple lineages of Buddhism in Asia, no seriousscholar asks the narrow, parochial question, “Which lineage is the authentic Buddhism?” To do so wouldmark one as a narrow sectarian. One hopes as well that practitioners do not think this way. Rather, to theextent that we are interested in comparing traditions, we want to ask ourselves how and why Buddhism

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developed so productively in all of these different directions. This multiplicity of lines of development,and the continuity of growth is a sign of the

vitality

of the Buddhist tradition, not of its

weakness

. Wedon’t expect that a whole tree is going to look just like the roots; we hope that on each branch flowers aregoing to develop; and we don’t see the diversity of form, whether in a living organism or in a society as asign of ill health, but as a sign of good health.I emphasize all of this—even though much of it is commonplace—only because very often in the contextof discussions of Buddhism and the modern world, when one mentions the ways Buddhism transformsWestern culture, people are happy to see this transformation and to see a kind of improvement in Westernculture, but then when they see respects in which Buddhist practice or Buddhist ideas themselves developor evolve or transform in interaction with Western culture, they become afraid and they recoil in orthodoxhorror: the Buddhadharma is no longer authentic! It’s no longer pure! It’s no longer real Buddhism!Something happened to it! It is that reaction that I really want to put aside, because transformation anddevelopment in response to engagement with new cultural contexts and new sets of ideas has beenhappening to Buddhism from the moment the Buddha touched the Earth at Bodhgaya. Buddhism has beentransforming because all compounded things are impermanent and Buddhism is a compounded phenomenon.

2. Historical comparisons

Let us return to the difference between the transmission of Buddhism to China and the transmission of Buddhism to Tibet. This comparison will provide us with a useful way of understanding some of theinteresting features of the transmission of Buddhism to the West, and will help us to see both what iscontinuous with the history of transmission within Asia, and what is subtly different. I will necessarily beguilty of a bit of caricature and overstatement but the caricatures will be useful.Here is a big difference between the two transmissions: when Buddhism came to, Tibet Buddhism cameto a country that had no written language, very little political unity, a religious tradition that was onlyreally practiced by a tiny minority, andno written philosophical tradition. So, while it would be anexaggeration to say that Tibet was a

tabula rasa

for Buddhism, it wouldn’t be

too much

of anexaggeration. As His Holiness the Dalai Lama sometimes puts it, “When we Tibetans decided that weneeded a civilization, we decided we needed three things: We needed a religion, we needed clothes andwe needed food. We looked at China; they had the best food so we took that. We looked at Mongolia;they had the best clothes, we took those; and we looked South to India; they had the best religion, so wetook that.”